helping you live a more organized life

Weekly Cleaning: Create a Schedule That Works For You

The first thing you need to do when creating a cleaning schedule is make sure that it works for your lifestyle.

I’ve been following a cleaning schedule for the past year-and-a-half that was created when I still had kids living at home. We were deep in the throes of senior year of high school and all that entails: band events, choral concerts, drama productions, driver’s education classes, after school jobs, and things I cannot remember but am happy to be done with. Raising teenagers is not for the weak of heart. While we no longer have those events going on, the amount of meetings my husband has to attend has increased, and the nights they are held on have changed. Our current cleaning schedule was no longer working for us.

The first thing I did was to create a list of all the chores that get done in our house on a weekly basis. If you read my last post, you know that these get divided up between my husband and myself. I also divide the chores up between which level of the house they take place on.

Back in my younger and not-so-smart days, I would do chores by task: dusting, floors, bathrooms, etc. So one day I would dust the entire house. The next day I would do all the floors. This was a lot of up and down work. These days, I do my chores based on where they are located. So one day I dust our bedroom, and the hallway (we have photos and a piece of furniture there), and my husband takes care of sweeping and Swiffering those floors. I gave up years ago on cleaning my children’s bedrooms. I used to fight with them to keep them clean, but you have to pick your battles with kids, and I decided clean rooms wasn’t a hill I wanted to die on. Do I hate that their rooms are a mess? Yes, absolutely. However, that is what closed doors are for. The next day, I dust the downstairs, and my husband takes care of sweeping and Swiffering the floors down there.

We plan the days our chores will take place based on the business of our week. Wednesday is typically a meeting night for my husband, and so on that day, I clean both bathrooms. If he gets to the floors on those days, great. If not, he does them on Thursday evenings while I’m at work. Vacuuming is something we do every few days, even though we only have a rug in one room, and a large area rug in our kitchen. We have a husky who loves to be outside, and she tracks in a lot of dirt. Right now, vacuuming is something we do every day, because she is shedding her coat. This is a twice yearly event, and we know that we won’t be stuck in this pattern forever, but right now we’ve adjusted our schedule to deal with the massive amount of hair being shed daily.

We have some chores that get done every day: in the morning and in the evening. Not the same chores, although our cat box is scheduled to get scooped twice a day. Up until this spring we had three cats, and this was a necessary task. To make some of these daily tasks easier, I’ve divided our store of cleaning supplies. It used to be, when I wanted to clean the upstairs bathroom I’d have to lug all the supplies up, clean, and lug them down again. Because I wipe my bathrooms daily, this was a little insane. I smartened up a few years ago, and began keeping cleaning supplies under the sink. Obviously this is easier with teenagers who don’t need to be monitored around chemicals (shhh, I know, I know), but a cabinet lock works also.

Once I sorted out what chores needed to get taken care of, and on what day, I ran my proposed schedule by my husband. He’s very easy going, and so long as I am happy with the schedule, he is happy with the schedule. He agreed that the changes I made would work better for him, and he liked the ability to be flexible when they didn’t. I typed up a list to hang in the kitchen in our command center, and I created a page in my bullet journal to work from when I do my daily planning.

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